make you chop

make you chop make you chop wake up you sleep all day says mary. i lost the battle to jet lag yesterday when i was at the point of beating it, i had a five hour nap, got roused up to take a walk and then i couldn't sleep the entire night until about 7am. i used my hours of insomnia to worry about what it would be like to have a life full of hours of insomnia, and i finished the last 100 pages of el amor en los tiempos del colera about the guy who waits 53 years for the woman he wanted. mary roused me up and made me eat some semolina with a spicy tomato sauce, bitter tea and then i went back to sleep. they know i take my tea with no garnish. we went to UNILAG to see mister tanny defend his master's thesis. we got there half an hour late and he was sitting out in an open air pavilion with cracked and diesel smoke blackened cement that surrounds all sides and the grass grows through the cracks that reveal dirt, and religious grafiti covers the cracks that reveal classrooms, las cuales don't have all their windows or the windows won't shutter but why do it since there is no air conditioning and rarely any electricity. we talk to some undergraduate students doing some calculus and physics homework with pencils and no calculators, using logarithm tables. mister tanny somehow has no access to a DLP projector or a laser pointer or a microphone to defend his thesis, so we go over his thin sheets of posterboard and meticulously drawn portraits on graph paper that have a synopsis of all he has learned about vibrations on thin plates.

the air is so dusty. the words i want your wife the latest smash hit of the nigerian box office is stenciled on highway dividers and shop fa‡ades throughout proper lagos. we listen to a radio commercial about this orgasmic chocolate cake and a woman called mademoiselle but anglicized cannot contain herself upon tasting it. it's an expat's french confiterie in victoria island, theodore chauffers us into this market set up over railroad tracks where trains still run and you just clear out when they come. we hopped out and bought some books about yoruba amidst the hawkers with fish, plantain, cassava, ginger, cell phone SIM cards, bottles of coke and copies of bill clinton's autobiography. there are some icelandic businessmen with their wives coming over for cocktails tonight. surya and i have to shave and put collars on but the deal's off unless we get black label. doctor falola dropped me the name of a man who will show us around ibadan and ile ife, who will give me a package of roasted snails to bring back for him. remember to roast them, or customs will seize them.